This is for a box that I only access remotely using nxclient. (It's running net-misc/nxserver-freenx.)

Later I will consider migrating to mate or cinnamon.

I also need to do this to keep NX working on a few servers I access, because Gnome 3 completely breaks it.

But to digress a little, why do we need to have this masking madness at all? Why don't we just separate 2 and 3 into `gnome-base/gnome:2` and `gnome-base/gnome:3` and let people install which version they want?

Someone needs to maintain it, that's the issue... Since Gnome2 components are no longer supported upstream, if something breaks, someone needs to fix it or fix the other component that breaks if gnome2 requires an old version...

Maybe someone can fully slot it...that would be nice but would require a considerable amount of effort..._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed to be advocating?

But to digress a little, why do we need to have this masking madness at all? Why don't we just separate 2 and 3 into `gnome-base/gnome:2` and `gnome-base/gnome:3` and let people install which version they want?

Ouch I can't believe they were so dumb as to use slot 2.0 for gnome 3 ebuilds. That's just nuts. Much better to slot as you say, and mask 3.0 on default profile, then unmask in systemd or gnome profile. Which was the whole point of having a systemd profile: to enable that kind of thing. Ugh.

As for mate maintenance, you're only talking about ebuilds, not upstream code; granted patches and bugs need to feedback, but that's exactly the same as any other project. So I'd encourage anyone who likes Gnome-2 to use, feedback and contribute to sabayon's work.

But to digress a little, why do we need to have this masking madness at all? Why don't we just separate 2 and 3 into `gnome-base/gnome:2` and `gnome-base/gnome:3` and let people install which version they want?

Ouch I can't believe they were so dumb as to use slot 2.0 for gnome 3 ebuilds. That's just nuts. Much better to slot as you say, and mask 3.0 on default profile, then unmask in systemd or gnome profile. Which was the whole point of having a systemd profile: to enable that kind of thing. Ugh.

As for mate maintenance, you're only talking about ebuilds, not upstream code; granted patches and bugs need to feedback, but that's exactly the same as any other project. So I'd encourage anyone who likes Gnome-2 to use, feedback and contribute to sabayon's work.

One could argue that by intentionally making it harder to maintain the separation by reusing the same slots, it makes it easier to apply the force to get people to abandon GNOME 2 in favor of GNOME 3 with the systemd requirements. Certainly, we've seen the posts from people sick and tired of fighting emerge blockers and begrudgingly switching to GNOME 3 even though they didn't want to and don't like it.

Per this thread, it's too much bother to change the slots now if GNOME 2 is going away, the GNOME team fully intends to abandon GNOME 2, don't care to see MATE in the tree, needs help to maintain Cinnamon going forward (so it could potentially get the same treatment), can't understand that some people might want gnome-light and don't care about bugs in programs like evolution, and they see GDM 2.20 as "a worst option." Oh, sure, someone can step up and maintain GNOME 2 if they want to, but keep in mind, they'll have to fight the very group of people trying to "provide choices" like forcing you to into an unsupported system so they can meet the technically inferior specs of a favored package rather than accept a simple patch.

Anyway, the end result is prepare for GNOME 2 to go away, don't expect MATE to be officially supported, and look for Cinnamon to eventually wither on the vine. That's what happens when the people at the top have an agenda to push even if it's contrary to the supposed goals of Gentoo. As an added bonus, they're now working on unilaterally suspending the commit rights of devs that may not agree with QA's decisions on the dev's own packages. Certainly such antisocial behavior must encourage new devs to join (and you can count me amongst the would-be devs that refused to join precisely because of the behavior of the official "leaders" over the last half decade), which is why they're also considering completely abandoning or autoforcing stabilization. But hey, it's great for stroking their egos until nobody wants to use the distro anymore. But, they promise to feel bad for you when they throw their hands up in the air... after all, it's not their fault that almost nobody wants to join their awesome clique anymore.

Last edited by saellaven on Mon Jan 27, 2014 10:02 pm; edited 1 time in total

The GNOME team on Gentoo is in a lack of manpower; there is no other option than to drop GNOME 2, if they keep it it'll be broken due to lack of maintenance which would be worse than people migrating to MATE desktop, Cinnamon or something else.

One could argue that by intentionally making it harder to maintain the separation by reusing the same slots, it makes it easier to apply the force to get people to abandon GNOME 2 in favor of GNOME 3 with the systemd requirements. Certainly, we've seen the posts from people sick and tired of fighting emerge blockers and begrudgingly switching to GNOME 3 even though they didn't want to and don't like it.

That's the only reason for such a dumb move, afaic. How on earth are you meant to contribute by maintaining the old ebuilds and packages, if they've deliberately poisoned the tree against you? And let's be clear: there is no valid technical reason for such a dumb move. It doesn't even match the upstream versioning.

As you said:

Quote:

Oh, sure, someone can step up and maintain GNOME 2 if they want to, but keep in mind, they'll have to fight the very group of people trying to "provide choices" like forcing you to into an unsupported system so they can meet the technically inferior specs of a favored package rather than accept a simple patch.

And your ebuilds can't co-exist because they've deliberately borked the 3.0 ebuilds with a 2.0 slot. For shame.

Quote:

But, they promise to feel bad for you when they throw their hands up in the air... after all, it's not their fault that almost nobody wants to join their awesome clique anymore.

Lul, indeed: throwing hands up in the air and feeling bad after the event, but "look shiny shiny" which turns out to be nothing but hype and years of bugfixing a crap design, seems to be the defining feature of the "new" school (same as the old school of One True Way.)

Still, not all devs are idiots, or caught up in the maelstrom of youth. The argument they make about the silent majority of users (apparently we're too timid to vote in an anonymous poll), applies far more to the developer-base, ime. Many of them hate the list, and not just because of users.

What steveL is saying simply isn't true. It's not the Gentoo packagers that have "poisoned" some packages but rather the original upstream of them, such as dev-libs/glib, have changed and since Gnome 2.x doesn't have a upstream anymore, they haven't been patched to be compatible with the newer libraries.
This is *exactly* what MATE is addressing, continuity of those packages and compability with the newer libraries.

Please get yourself a CVS access to gentoo-x86/ tree and commit MATE to Portage. If you want a mentor, which is mandatory prerequisite for becoming a developer, don't hesistate to ask me on IRC (Freenode) or someone else. I will happily help to a extent, as in, you need to be well experienced with writing ebuilds beforehand.
In fact, the lack of such move currently implies there are no intrested people in Gnome 2.x and/or MATE. And honestly, I'm a bit suprised.

Last edited by ssuominen on Sun Feb 16, 2014 7:54 pm; edited 1 time in total

i agree with what you say steveL. poisoned tree, looks like only option is to go with cinnamon, mask, or abandon ship.... when this was starting to brew i threw xfce on the box. im not so feisty about systemd, but im straight up pissed about flushing gnome2 down the toilet. i might give cinnamon a whirl on the desktop. as i said before, they should of named gnome3 something else as it is completely different.

as i said before, they should of named gnome3 something else as it is completely different.

Yes it should have been, but a couple of devs simply didn't want anyone to keep on using gnome2 since it could be used without their darling systemd. _________________Asus m5a99fx, FX 8320 - amd64-multilib, 3.15.9-zen, glibc-2.19, gcc-4.9.2, eudev
xorg-server-1.16, openbox w/lxpanel, nouveau, oss4(2011)

What steveL is saying simply isn't true. It's not the Gentoo packagers that have "poisoned" some packages but rather the original upstream of them, such as dev-libs/glib, have changed and since Gnome 2.x doesn't have a upstream anymore, they haven't been patched to be compatible with the newer libraries.
This is *exactly* what MATE is addressing, continuity of those packages and compability with the newer libraries.

It was still the decision of Gentoo's GNOME team to use SLOT-2 on those packages and they recently reaffirmed that it would be too much work for them to bother to go in and change it.

Quote:

Please get yourself a CVS access to gentoo-x86/ tree and commit MATE to Portage. If you want a mentor, which is mandatory prerequisite for becoming a developer, don't hesistate to ask me on IRC (Freenode) or someone else. I will happily help to a extent, as in, you need to be well experienced with writing ebuilds beforehand.
In fact, the lack of such move currently implies there are no intrested people in Gnome 2.x and/or MATE. And honestly, I'm a bit suprised.

I can't speak for SteveL or anyone else, but I gave it consideration. In the end, I decided that I'm not going to become a dev and join an overtly hostile environment with a handful of cliques that play politics to force their decisions on everyone else. The entire way systemd, removal of /usr support, intentionally holding fixes back from openrc, etc were handled, the actions of a couple devs who have come here only to stir the pot, etc, I have no desire to be one of you. IMO, the #1 reason why Gentoo doesn't have more devs joining, despite the general need for more help, is BECAUSE OF the existing Gentoo devs and, in particular, their attitude.

hows lxde working for you moose? so far xfce4 hasn't done me wrong, i got used to divorced gnome as xfapplet was never in portage that i had seen. im really dreading gtk3, last time i seen it it was a gigantic mess.

Lxde works fine. I have gtk3 locked to not go above 3.4.4 (which is in my local portage tree)
and it's only used for a couple of programs. Gtk2 is used by far more, at least on my system.

I've heard too many horror stories from application developers that talk about gtk3 being broken
from release to release, and I've seen the gnome people state that they don't really want any apps
to be written in gtk3 at least for the gnome DE, in other words if it's NIH then they don't want it.

Xfce should work into the foreseeable future though I would keep an eye on it as they have already
said they will be looking at using gtk3.

As far as the blog, I've been telling people that if they wanted gnome 2 they needed to copy all the
ebuilds into their local tree for a while now, and they need to keep the tarred source files
because when they remove the ebuild the source files typically disappear too.

It was pretty obvious that they were trying to get rid of gnome2 when they didn't slot 3 in it's own slot.

Lack of developers may or may not be a valid excuse, but a few of the current developers on the
systemd/gnome3 rah-rah squad have soured others from wanting to work anywhere near them.

Edit to add: As far as the contentious developers, I have both of them on ignore
as I find them entirely useless for their claimed purposes, ie being developers.
I don't need koolaid drinking groupies to enlighten me_________________Asus m5a99fx, FX 8320 - amd64-multilib, 3.15.9-zen, glibc-2.19, gcc-4.9.2, eudev
xorg-server-1.16, openbox w/lxpanel, nouveau, oss4(2011)

Last edited by Anon-E-moose on Mon Feb 17, 2014 10:41 am; edited 2 times in total

What steveL is saying simply isn't true. It's not the Gentoo packagers that have "poisoned" some packages but rather the original upstream of them, such as dev-libs/glib, have changed and since Gnome 2.x doesn't have a upstream anymore, they haven't been patched to be compatible with the newer libraries.
This is *exactly* what MATE is addressing, continuity of those packages and compability with the newer libraries.

It was still the decision of Gentoo's GNOME team to use SLOT-2 on those packages and they recently reaffirmed that it would be too much work for them to bother to go in and change it.

No, it wasn't. It was GNOME upstream who decided to call binaries/libraries/headers and so forth the same, like eg. gnome-terminal is still gnome-terminal and not gnome3-terminal so that
SLOTting was impossible. Those that were possible to SLOT, have been SLOTed.

Yet another issue MATE is solving.

saellaven wrote:

ssuominen wrote:

Please get yourself a CVS access to gentoo-x86/ tree and commit MATE to Portage. If you want a mentor, which is mandatory prerequisite for becoming a developer, don't hesistate to ask me on IRC (Freenode) or someone else. I will happily help to a extent, as in, you need to be well experienced with writing ebuilds beforehand.
In fact, the lack of such move currently implies there are no intrested people in Gnome 2.x and/or MATE. And honestly, I'm a bit suprised.

I can't speak for SteveL or anyone else, but I gave it consideration. In the end, I decided that I'm not going to become a dev and join an overtly hostile environment with a handful of cliques that play politics to force their decisions on everyone else. The entire way systemd, removal of /usr support, intentionally holding fixes back from openrc, etc were handled, the actions of a couple devs who have come here only to stir the pot, etc, I have no desire to be one of you. IMO, the #1 reason why Gentoo doesn't have more devs joining, despite the general need for more help, is BECAUSE OF the existing Gentoo devs and, in particular, their attitude.

I should have guessed, you are in for the complaining, but not for the contributing part. No offense, but the distribution doesn't lose much with users like you. Don't slam the door on the way out.

Xfce should work into the foreseeable future though I would keep an eye on it as they have already
said they will be looking at using gtk3.

I'm maintaining much of the involved packages, sys-fs/udev, sys-auth/consolekit and Xfce, and I can assure they will keep working in the future

And even if sys-auth/polkit made it impossible to use sys-auth/consolekit, I have a contigency plan to restore old plugdev -group like behavior using
PolicyKit .rules files, like ArchLinux has 'storage' and 'power'

And even if sys-fs/udev became impossible to maintain because systemd upstream makes it too hard to be separated from the sources, we have
sys-fs/eudev as contigency

Xfce upstream includes OpenBSD developer among others, and many BSDs still rely on ConsoleKit and Xfce working with it, so I'm not worried about
that either, with me involved or not

Gentoo's Xfce will start using GTK+-3 soon as possible, but that's not anykind of problem, only improvement. GTK+-3 xfce4-panel-4.11 (pre-release of 4.12)
was released yesterday, with ./configure switches to allow both, GTK+-2 and GTK+-3 plugins to work at the same time
Those 4.11 prereleases will get into Portage when first official prerelease of Xfce 4.12 has been officially announced

Just saw the post... luckily I started investigating LXDE/XFCE as the way to go instead of Gnome3...

I had installed Gnome3 on my main laptop and it actually works fine (as well as it being a mostly clean upgrade) but I can't give up the disk space on my smaller computers. But I do wonder if LXDE/XFCE would end up pulling in gnome3 deps someday or fall into the gnome2 issue..._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed to be advocating?

Xfce is gtk all the way and going to stay there, 2 now, moving to 3 per their web site.

Lxde is gtk2 and they are not upgrading to gtk3, they are merging going forward with razor-qt.
In other words new development for lxde will be qt based.
They have said they intend for the gtk2 version to stay around.
But there won't be new development in it AFAIK._________________Asus m5a99fx, FX 8320 - amd64-multilib, 3.15.9-zen, glibc-2.19, gcc-4.9.2, eudev
xorg-server-1.16, openbox w/lxpanel, nouveau, oss4(2011)

What steveL is saying simply isn't true. It's not the Gentoo packagers that have "poisoned" some packages but rather the original upstream of them, such as dev-libs/glib, have changed and since Gnome 2.x doesn't have a upstream anymore, they haven't been patched to be compatible with the newer libraries.
This is *exactly* what MATE is addressing, continuity of those packages and compability with the newer libraries.

It was still the decision of Gentoo's GNOME team to use SLOT-2 on those packages and they recently reaffirmed that it would be too much work for them to bother to go in and change it.

No, it wasn't. It was GNOME upstream who decided to call binaries/libraries/headers and so forth the same, like eg. gnome-terminal is still gnome-terminal and not gnome3-terminal so that
SLOTting was impossible. Those that were possible to SLOT, have been SLOTed.

Yet another issue MATE is solving.

Complete lack of intellectual honesty and the first thing that the clique always turns to...

By the same token, why was SteveL's well tested patch for a separate /usr not discussed during the Council meeting in September when they decided to make a separate /usr unsupported only because of the technical inferiority of systemd? Why wasn't it included in openrc unless williamh, the supposed lead on openrc, favors systemd over his "own" project? As the udev maintainer, why didn't you include it in udev-init-scripts? Why did you spend months slamming eudev last year while also making promises you know you can't keep to the people using udev, all in an effort to try to diminish interest in eudev?

See, here's the thing... the devs are quick to blame upstream, but the reality is, it was entirely the choice OF THE GENTOO DEVS to limit Gentoo for the benefit of systemd, GNOME3 and friends. The Gentoo devs themselves are hard at work eliminating choice in Gentoo so that they can favor their pet projects. Blame upstream, blame the users, blame anyone but themselves because arrogance rules the day.

ssuominen wrote:

saellaven wrote:

ssuominen wrote:

Please get yourself a CVS access to gentoo-x86/ tree and commit MATE to Portage. If you want a mentor, which is mandatory prerequisite for becoming a developer, don't hesistate to ask me on IRC (Freenode) or someone else. I will happily help to a extent, as in, you need to be well experienced with writing ebuilds beforehand.
In fact, the lack of such move currently implies there are no intrested people in Gnome 2.x and/or MATE. And honestly, I'm a bit suprised.

I can't speak for SteveL or anyone else, but I gave it consideration. In the end, I decided that I'm not going to become a dev and join an overtly hostile environment with a handful of cliques that play politics to force their decisions on everyone else. The entire way systemd, removal of /usr support, intentionally holding fixes back from openrc, etc were handled, the actions of a couple devs who have come here only to stir the pot, etc, I have no desire to be one of you. IMO, the #1 reason why Gentoo doesn't have more devs joining, despite the general need for more help, is BECAUSE OF the existing Gentoo devs and, in particular, their attitude.

I should have guessed, you are in for the complaining, but not for the contributing part. No offense, but the distribution doesn't lose much with users like you. Don't slam the door on the way out.

And thanks for proving my point about the clique in action... instead of stepping back and saying "hmm, maybe that's a valid point and we should ask ourselves if we can do anything differently to attract more help..." the immediate thought it to tell someone to not even use the distro. It's the users that are the problem when it's not upstream that is the problem. It's everyone except the Gentoo devs and their insular attitudes.

more soapbox crap, but I think that's all this thread can be now if Gnome2 is leaving the tree:

While it is a pain that Gnome2 is leaving the tree I'm not going to complain about it, and neither should other users. Yes it is a large pain in the @$$ but I'm still grateful for the many years that I had it installed and still have my install not be out of date. This is not the first time that I had to deal with a massive system change (Apache 1 to 2 and MySQL 4 to 5 were the other two incidents I recall that had similar headaches) but I still have to think of the alternative: reinstall the whole system...

... in which I still had to deal with the new software...

I still do hope that Mate becomes well packaged but it's a bit too late for me, I think all of my systems will have migrated to something else before that becomes ready. Oh well. Again, at least I didn't have to reinstall because the whole *system* is no longer being updated..._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed to be advocating?

First of all, I'm an outsider to Gnome. It is clear that, no matter what the real or fictional reasons about Gnome-2 getting kicked out of portage might be, you as a non-developer have no power to do anything against that, certainly not for your choice or any amount of words. Unless you've got ample money to pay people for work they themselves do not enjoy. Chances are you have never cared for a package set as big as Gnome or KDE, but you still think there is not a whole lot of work involved in keeping that thing running, while actually not dog feeding it yourself (as none of the devs is using Gnome-2 anymore). But there you are, happily using Gnome-2 against all odds, and you've got a date for when Gnome packages are going to leave portage. So copy them, it's that easy after all! Into your local overlay and prove that you have a point. Push your ebuilds to github and make them available to fellow Gnome-2 users, collaborate, prove everyone wrong. Maybe you succeed._________________backend.cpp:92:2: warning: #warning TODO - this error message is about as useful as a cooling unit in the arctic

So stop wasting your energy in here and go start your own overlay already. I will give you a few months until you are up in arms about toolchain bumps and userspace deps, harassing other dev teams for kicking out old, unmaintained and thus vulnerable packages that your old cruft so desperately requires to be able to build and run._________________backend.cpp:92:2: warning: #warning TODO - this error message is about as useful as a cooling unit in the arctic